Archive for October, 2011|Monthly archive page

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society“ – Jiddu Krishnamurti

On one side of the spectrum we have righteous patriarchs putting an end to their progeny’s life to prevent familial dishonour while at the other end of the spectrum we have incestous fathers peddling their daughter to strangers for quick money. The former is prevalent in the northern states of India while the latter is unnervingly common in the south, namely Kerala.

Movie poster of KHAP, a 2011 Hindi film, based on the Manoj-Babli honour killing case and Khap Panchayats in villages of Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, which order honour killings.

This practice of subjecting one’s offspring to death(or an horrendous life) is unprecedented. The single purpose of every living organism on this planet is the propagation of its species. Fathers are actively destroying their only chance of seed dissemination by tarnishing their daughters, which is beyond comprehension for a species that is said to be blessed with divine wisdom. At this point in time, it would be wise of us to excogigate on what exactly is being accomplished by our fathers who art on Earth.

A major fart-point(non-scientific term) of the human brain is its incapability to grasp individual exclusivity. This also extends to his environment but thats a topic for another post. The fathers are in-fact attempting to think on behalf of their children(global phenomenon). Although the author ponders on who exactly is the child in the scenario since the elder parent is unable to control his emotions just like in the case of a new-born baby. This is the second fart-point of the human brain, the inability to dissociate emotional and rational thought.

In the case of honour killings, why don’t the fathers just take their own lives if they feel that way about it? And when it comes to killing someone, no matter how you justify yourself, it is an action that can never be reinstated. This phenomenon is much more globally spread than just in our Bharat Mata.

An Iraqi woman, Noor Faleh Almaleki, 20, whose family had moved to Phoenix, Arizona, was hit by her father’s Jeep Grand Cherokee in October 2009, as she walked across a car park. She lay in a coma for two weeks in hospital before dying.

By his(Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48) own admission, this was an intentional act and the reason was that his daughter was getting too westernized which brought shame on him and his family.

It is worrying that Kerala and Maharashtra are the two states with maximum arrests pertaining to child pornography. From 2007-2009, Maharashtra registered 27, 17 and 25 cases and for Kerala the figures were 20, 39 and 44. The fathers who peddle their children are the by-product of a predominantly patriarchal approach to marriages. The husband calls the shots and the wife stays mum. Some may argue that Kerala culture entertains some kind of matriarchal structure too but you need to understand that even in that scenario, the patriarch holds the right to veto the decisions. The only way forward is for the proliferation of ‘mutualistic marriages‘ among the population in our God’s forsaken country.

Mutualistic marriages feature a companionate relationship between the husband and wife instead of the clichéd dominant husband and submissive wife. For both the above mentioned diseases plaguing patriarchs of modern India and around the world, mutualistic marriage entails as cure. Imagine a man walking over to kill/rape his daughter and finding the lovely gaze of his wife looking at him through his daughter’s eyes. There is no better moral conditioning than this.

This is neither a post on spiritual musings nor on linguistic principles. This is about hierarchy in the male population. As in the case of a wild pack of wolves, armed with just a binocular and shit-loads of free time, one can successfully determine the ‘alpha’ male of the group. The alpha male gets the best portion of food and the right to impregnate all the females in the pack.

Is this guy alpha or beta or omega?

Identifying the alpha among a ‘human pack’ is slightly tricky, though some guidelines have been put forth.

• Alpha male is considered as someone who is with leadership traits. Physically they are portrayed to have straight backs, head held up high, chest thrust outward and shoulder squared up.

• Those who are considered to be Beta males are famously described to have slumped shoulders, with bent spines and heads down. They are described as people with low self-esteem and lacking confidence.

The analysis gets more complicated as with any scientific principle with the advent of a third, comparatively recent addition, known as the Omega males. The omega males are characterized as – the true nice guys, whom you won’t remember from a party since they’re also frequently labelled as losers.

It is interesting to note that this study of male anthropology conforms to the Heisenberg’s Uncertainity Principle, which states that the very act of observing the system contributes to changes in the system. Such as a previously beta male could decide to latch onto the prerequisites of alphaism and attempt conversion. This is possible since flexibility of the hierarchy is very common among humans where it varies according to the environment, although the static nature is somewhat pronounced in the political landscape of backward economies.

The world(or female population) apparently has an affinity towards strong-willed alphas who lead with their vision, rather than the rest of males who end their sentences with ‘right?’. It appears that the world(and female population) isn’t clear on what kind of ideas they’re willing to admit their subjugation. For e.g Hitler was an alpha male and many did follow him albeit his idea involved genocide as a crucial component. Maybe this has something to do with the gullibility inherent in humans.

Throughout history all kinds of classifications, anthropology and otherwise, have appeared biased towards male exclusivity. Feminism has given birth to the alpha-female. The dominant female prefers the beta male because the ego takes a back-seat in that relationship. Otherwise, it would be a constant struggle between the alphas, male & female.

70% of the male population fall under the beta category. Being beta is not essentially demeaning considering the results of recent studies showing that the alphas deal with insurmountable amounts of stress. This study was done on baboons by analysing the hormone levels in their droppings. Two baboon populations led by aggressive alpha males fought over garbage left at a lodge. It led to a point where the contaminated meat killed off all the alpha males. The gentler betas gained control and the group got mellower. Even more fantastic was that each male in the group got two females to call his own. Maybe, beta is the new alpha.

Democracy is a form of government where the opinion of the common citizen is taken into consideration in view of the impact that framing of new laws has on their everyday lives. The democratic state protects the citizen from calamity because essentially the democratic government is supposed to be an extension of the common citizen. This, of course is the ideal state.

As in the case of any pure idea put forth, e.g Christianity, some individuals take it upon themselves to modify and practice a horrendous, mutated version, because the masters know better than you. According to the self-appointed masters, God & Jesus consider you to be too insignificant for direct communication. Apparently they’ll only talk to you via the priest master. In the same way, you, the common man, do not know what’s good for you, hence you need ruling masters who will be appearing to fill their pockets from the state treasury but they’re supposedly working for your benefit according to some convoluted form of governance.

The myriad of malaise affecting a democratic state includes corruption, dynasty and merging of superstition and governance. It might be interesting to note that the birth of the Old Testament lies in surrounding areas of the Fertile Crescent where the population was growing too large to control, about 6000 to 8000 years ago. Hence, the invisible Father in heaven came into being, who will cast lightning on you unless you obey Him and as an extension, your God-appointed ruler. You get a pass to heaven provided you don’t question your heavenly king. It took aeons to dissociate state and religion although efforts are still on to merge it again, as shown by the Hindutva ideology practiced by BJP in India and the Bible belt in U.S.A.

Women suffrage movements are a comparatively recent phenomenon. The weak gender was thought incapable of making decisions, only considered to be homemakers and still are in many parts of the world. Saudi women will have to wait till 2015 to get their right to vote. Interestingly, God is always thought of as male even though it is only the females that give birth to life. The masters know what the formless God looks like, because they constructed the Almighty in the first place. Following is an alternate depiction of God, Alanis Moirsette in Dogma. Check out awesomely annoyed Professor Snape too(rofl).

We’ll tackle political dynasty in some other faraway post. Next item on the agenda is corruption. Anna Hazare held the attention of the entire country with his fast on the Jan Lokpal Bill. This disenchantment with the ruling class had been building up for a long time and finally boiled over. The weekly magazine, Frontline proclaimed that Gandhi would never have supported any form of Satyagraha in an independent India. Well, he neither would have taken a liking to the amount of extra-governmental payola being procured by government officials, ironically in offices with Gandhi’s portrait hung prominently above on the wall.

The ‘spasm’ in the post title refers not just to the illness of our democracy but also to the sudden bout of sickness that affects our ruling masters when they’re found guilty of malpractice and send to jail. They are as healthy as a horse when there is no chance of prosecution. These healthy masters stand for election after election with a plastic smile embedded into their ever so made up faces, yet when it comes to jail-time, they’re beset with all sorts of disorders ranging from dementia to kidney failures.

Get well soon, masters. Shortly, the treasury will be ripe for looting come election time.

Proponents of a multipolar global society may have to re-evaluate the extent of interdependency and mutual co-operation among nations considering the huge amount of political clout enjoyed by big brother, U.S.A. The superpower’s main objective since World War I has been to ensure sufficient inflow of oil and its products to sustain the American military-industrial complex.

1913 –> Henry Ford, 50 years of age, recast the face of automobile manufacturing by introducing the automated assembly line.

1914 –> Assembly time reduced from 12&1/2 hours to just 1&1/2 hours.

1921 – 1925 –> Declining production costs enable Ford to cut automobile prices upto six times, essentially reducing the cost to $290. This was less than the combined three-month wage of an average American worker.

And that is how, my children, Americans got their ride. Cars were the symbol of the consumer driven society in 1919 and it continues to be even today. There were 6.7 million cars on American roads in 1919 but by 1929 it inflated to 27 million! When big brother got cars, everyone else wants one and here in Trivandrum(India), we have the latest Audi and Mercedes trudging along on tiny pathways. Because, you see, the imported cars are manufactured according to global standards but the road they travel on is unfortunately locally manufactured, lead by your ruling masters(or cretin – used interchangeably), who spend every moment scheming new ways to sponge-off their constituency’s revenue and hence public amenities get the brunt of it. [Pardon the digression]

The American search for energy security began from the early 1900s, which took them into regions of the globe where its national security interests would not otherwise have been at stake. The stalemate between the U.S and the Middle-East is not slated to end anytime soon. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the jet black area towards the middle of the map below.

Worldwide distribution of petroleum deposits

This explains why the Americans are hell bent on bringing democracy to the Arab nations while not blinking an eye in the aftermath of terrible human rights violations in Myanmar or East Timor.

Go back to bed, child…big brother will protect you now, on his terms of course.

A dead, endangered sea-turtle washes up ashore at Pass Christian, April 16, 2011. Following the Gulf oil spill the number of turtles stranded in the Gulf coast was up by seven times in March, as reported by NWF - (Mario Tama/Getty Images/Boston.com)